Abstract
Speculative and futuring practices in design and elsewhere can draw on visual metaphors to explore and compare possible futures. The nature of those metaphors shape the sorts of futures that are possible, and how they are understood to exist within time. A very common visual metaphor used is the Future or Voros Cone, in which the future timeline opens out in concentric cones representing the likelyhood of a possible future, but this visualisation of the future has been criticised as technocratic and singular, drawing on a generic grammar from hard science fiction that frames futures around Time’s Arrow and considers how far they diverge from a continution of the now (Coulton et al., 2016; Tonkinwise, 2014); research has been done to explore alternatives to this model (Carey et al., 2021) This study explores how more pluriversal, less linear versions of possible pasts, presents and futures can be drawn from speculative narratives in the fantasy genre. In particular, it considers the structural metaphors of The Tree, drawing on the Norse myth of Yggdrasil, the world tree; The Wood, drawing on the idea of the wood as an interstice between different realities, and The Path, as a safe route through such interstitial forests and places. The study discusses how these ideas are encountered in mythological and fantasy texts, while the workshop activity explores these ideas—through structural and emotional metaphorical projection—to co-create new frameworks for visualising pluriversal futures.
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
2025 Special Focus—Thinking, Learning, Doing: Plural Ways of Design
KEYWORDS
Pluriversal Design, Speculative Design, More Than Human, Design Fabulation
